Once you’ve started blogging people are going to ask, "Who’s your audience?” You will hear this a lot, “Who is your audience?’ or “You need to write for your audience.”

Everywhere you look online someone has a tutorial, blog post or video promising to help you define your audience, develop your customer personas, speak your customer’s language, etc. And I agree, you do need to understand who your audience is but I promise you taking a course to help you find your audience as you get started blogging, isn’t going to help you.

In fact, it might hurt. You need to reach a certain level of competence with yourself and your craft before courses or memberships like these will be of any use to you. Until then, these courses will only serve to confuse and frustrate you, which will cause you to delay or worse case, stop before you even get started. Don’t let this be you.

Yes, you do need to have some idea of who you believe your ideal reader to be when you get started. However, what is more, important and fundamental to your success initially, is the topic or subject matter you want to become known for.

As I’ve said before You need to be “excited” about your topic or area of expertise. You need to have a good baseline understanding of your topic. This will make it easier for your ideas to flow from your head to your fingertips to the keyboard to the screen just to the left of the blinking cursor.

Being excited about your area of expertise will keep you going as you move along the path to building your own brand because the simple truth is, in the beginning, you will have no audience. There will be no one paying attention for to ask what to write about or what problem you can help them solve.

Instead of having someone to lean on for topics or ask about their pain points, there will only be you, your ideas and your computer. That’s why I believe it’s so important when starting out, not to write for an audience but to write for yourself instead.